It's not 1st April, but if it was - this post would be the perfect thing to release! It's about shunction, a parody project I've written. While it is a parody, hopefully it is of some use to someone :P

The other week, I discovered Azure Functions - thanks to Rob Miles. In the same moment, I thought that it would be fairly trivial to build a system by which you could self-host it - and shunction was born.

Built upon the lantern build engine, shunction lets you keep a folder of executable scripts and execute them at will. It supports 4 modes of operation:

adhoc - One-off runs

cron - Regularly scheduled execution

inotify - Execute when something changes on disk

http - Listen for HTTP requests

Of course, the system can be upgraded at a later date to support additional operating modes. The last 2 in the list start a persistent and long-running process, which will only exit if terminated.

Shunction is designed to run on Linux systems. Because of the shebang, any executable script (be it a shell script, a Python script, a Node.js script, or otherwise) is supported.

If you've got multiple tasks you want have your server running and want to keep them all in one place, then shunction would allow you to do so. For example, you could keep the task scripts in a git repository that you clone down onto the server, and then use shunction to execute them as needed.